Friday, February 06, 2015

Fewer Top Graduates want to Join Teach for America

Teach for America,
the education powerhouse that has sent thousands of handpicked college
graduates to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, is
suddenly having recruitment problems.

For
the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have
dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about
10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country
as of the end of last month.

The group, which has sought to transform education in close alignment with the charter school
movement, has advised schools that the size of its teacher corps this
fall could be down by as much as a quarter and has closed two of its
eight national summer training sites, in New York City and Los Angeles.

“I
want the numbers to be higher, because the demand from districts is
extremely high and we’re not going to meet it this year,” said Matt
Kramer, a co-chief executive of Teach for America. But, he added, “it is
not existentially concerning.”

Last
year, the highly selective program accepted about 15 percent of its
applicants. Mr. Kramer said there were no plans to lower standards for
the current year simply to yield a larger corps of teachers.

Hannah Nguyen, a USC junior and aspiring teacher who opposes the Teach for America program.

Some
say the decline in applicants could point to a loss of luster for the
program, which rose to prominence through the idea that teaching the
nation’s poorest, most needy students could be a crusade, like the Peace
Corps. Teach for America has sent hundreds of graduates to Capitol
Hill, school superintendents’ offices and education reform groups,
seeding a movement that has supported testing and standards, teacher
evaluations tethered to student test scores, and a weakening of teacher
tenure.

“We
are sort of at 2.0 of education reform, and its future direction seems a
little bit uncertain at this point,” said David M. Steiner, the dean of
the Hunter College School of Education in New York.

Leaders
of the organization say their biggest problem is that the rebounding
economy has given high-achieving college graduates more job choices.

“It’s
so different from three years ago, where suddenly you have candidates
that may have an offer from Facebook and Wells Fargo and an offer to
join the T.F.A. corps, and clearly, the money is going to be radically
different,” said Lida Jennings, executive director of the Los Angeles
office of Teach for America.

Mr.
Kramer dismissed the idea that the group’s philosophy was driving
candidates away.

“As I talk to people on campuses, it is not like the
central thing I hear,” he said. “I don’t hear people say, ‘Oh, I hear
this criticism and therefore I don’t want to do Teach for America.’ ”

Teaching
in general has been losing favor. From 2010 to 2013, the number of
student candidates enrolled in teacher training programs fell 12.5
percent, according to federal data.

But
Teach for America’s belief that new college graduates can jump into
teaching without much training, as well as its ties through prominent
alumni to the testing and standards movement, may also be taking a toll,
driving away the kind of students the program once attracted.

When
Haleigh Duncan, a junior at Macalester College in St. Paul, first came
across Teach for America recruiters on campus during her freshman year
in 2012, she was captivated by the group’s mission to address
educational inequality.

Ms.
Duncan, an English major, went back to her dormitory room and pinned
the group’s pamphlet on a bulletin board. She was also attracted by the
fact that it would be a fast route into teaching. “I felt like I didn’t
want to waste time and wanted to jump into the field,” she said.

But
as she learned more about the organization, Ms. Duncan lost faith in
its short training and grew skeptical of its ties to certain donors,
including the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that founded Walmart.
She decided she needed to go to a teachers’ college after graduation.
“I had a little too much confidence in my ability to override my lack of
experience through sheer good will,” she said.

Founded
in 1990 by Wendy Kopp, a Princeton University student who proposed the
idea in her senior thesis, Teach for America started as a kind of civil
rights crusade, with 500 novice teachers in six regions across the
country.

The
nonprofit organization faced financial and management challenges during
its first decade, but since 2000 had been growing its teaching corps by
close to 20 percent every year. Ms. Kopp, who now runs Teach for All, a
global spinoff initiative she founded, declined to be interviewed for
this article.

With corporate sponsors like Wells Fargo and Comcast NBCUniversal, charitable contributions from the
Walton family, and foundations overseen by the families of the
billionaires John D. Arnold and Eli Broad, Teach for America now has
10,500 teachers in classrooms in 35 states and employs 2,400 people
across its regional offices. Last year, it had revenue of $196.2
million.

Some
school officials say Teach for America has been a vital pipeline for
keeping classrooms staffed. In Warren County in eastern North Carolina, a
poor rural district of 2,460 students, one in five teachers are Teach
for America recruits.

“If
we didn’t have them, we would really have some very serious problems,”
said Ray Spain, the Warren County schools superintendent. “We just
aren’t geographically in that area of the state where it makes it easy
to recruit teachers.”

But
as Teach for America grew, it became a magnet for criticism from
teachers unions, education schools and some policy makers, who argued
that sending enthusiastic but untested graduates to classrooms in some
of the nation’s poorest communities with just five weeks of training
would not produce great teachers. They also said the program’s two-year
teaching stints brought instability.

Teach for America “was always going to have a half-life,” said Arthur Levine, the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which administers a training program for high school math and science teachers.

“It
did wonderful things and attracted superb people to teaching and
prepared a generation of leaders for the country,” Mr. Levine said. But,
he added, that was not going to profoundly change schools. “Eventually,
we’re going to get to the point of trying to fix the system rather than
applying a patch,” he said.

Critics
said that by legitimizing the short-term teaching stint, Teach for
America made it easier for some communities to paper over the fact that
low-income students were regularly stuck with inexperienced teachers.

“This is not just about T.F.A.,” said Kati Haycock, the president of the Education Trust,
a nonprofit group that works to improve education for low-income and
minority students. But “if you even raise the subject, you are somehow
calling into question Teach for America.”

She continued, “It’s still a Band-Aid, even if it’s a better Band-Aid.”

In
response to some criticisms, Teach for America has started providing
fellowships to corps members who commit to more than two years. It has
also begun recruiting college juniors so it can provide longer-term
teacher training. At the same time, its ideas have spread, and there are
now a number of alternate paths to becoming a teacher.

Charter
schools, which receive public money but are run independently, are
particularly reliant on Teach for America. At YES Prep, a charter
network founded by a former Teach for America member, about 10 percent
of all teachers in 13 schools are corps members; schools in the KIPP
network, founded by two alumni, also frequently recruit new teachers
from Teach for America.

Caleb
Dolan, the executive director of KIPP Massachusetts, which oversees
four schools in the Boston area, said that Teach for America was willing
to debate with students who were unsure whether to join. “Ultimately,
that willingness to engage will win over the hearts and minds of kids
who should be teaching,” he said.

But on some campuses, students have started campaigning against the group.

“Teacher
turnover really destabilizes a learning environment,” said Hannah
Nguyen, a University of Southern California junior who aspires to be a
teacher but has helped organize protests against Teach for America. “So
having a model that perpetuates that inequity in and of itself was also
very confusing for me.”

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Sound like economy might be getting a little better and a few would rather get employed in what they prepared for in college. Don't need this as a back up anymore. Got to say, I am not so sure I would want my kid taught by someone who never considered teaching until they got ready to graduate (with not teaching prep course either).

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